


Blackbird Singing In The Dead of Night

by ivorygates



Series: Blackbird Singing In The Dead Of Night [1]
Category: Mezzanine AU - Fandom, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Not Broken Wings Either, Not Mezzanine, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rule 63, genderflip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-11
Updated: 2011-06-11
Packaged: 2018-08-12 11:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7933486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teenage girl.  Hair bleached blonde with big chunky highlights in candy pink and bright turquoise.  Her fingernails are painted some dark color -- black or blue or green -- but they're manicured back to the quick, and what Cammie first took for a sheer long-sleeved t-shirt under the tank isn't.  It's tattoos.</p><p>The girl nods sharply (and something clicks in Cammie's mind: there's a boy inside that girlsuit; that's how a boy moves, not a girl) and pushes past her into the living room, slinging the leather jacket in her hand over her shoulder as she passes. </p><p>"You have no fucking notion who I am, do you, Mitchell?" she says and there's defiance and irritation and something that's almost despair in that tone, and Cammie's torn between the desire to <em>get the hell out of here</em> or <em>come to attention.</em>  And she won't do the one and she can't do the other, and there's something here that almost, almost…</p><p>She shakes her head slowly.  <em>No, sir, no ma'am, I have no fucking clue at all who I just opened the door to, and why don't you tell me?</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackbird Singing In The Dead of Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [synecdochic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synecdochic/gifts).
  * Inspired by [this town is a song about you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6415909) by [synecdochic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synecdochic/pseuds/synecdochic). 



> First there was Broken Wings. Then Cameron Mitchell's gender was flipped and there was Mezzanine. This is where I flip JD Nielsen's gender *too*.
> 
> The title is, of course, from the Beatles lyric that goes: 
> 
> _"Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly..."_  
> 
> While this isn't yet complete (because I usually manage to work my way through to an HEA), the rest is in bits and pieces, and this comes to a pretty good stopping place, so I thought I'd post it.

Cameron Mitchell pushes herself and prods herself, sits up when all she wants is to lie down and props herself up when all she wants is to fall down. Day after endless day, from the bed to the wheelchair, from the wheelchair to the PT bars, from the days when they have to keep her in the secured wing of the Academy hospital because she's babbling her guts out under morphine to the days when Momma's saying they can fix up a nice room for her right down the hall from theirs and all Cammie can think is that at least the house is already fitted out for a cripple if it winds up that she's lost her legs to the Air Force just like her daddy did.

She pushes herself and drives herself, and if grim determination could have made a difference she'd have been out dancing three months after the crash, but there's no way to tell if she'll walk again even by then, so she pushes herself and drives herself until the blisters on her hands match the sores on her _ass_ and her doctors and her nurses and the whole fucking PT staff all have that look that says that if anybody deserves a stroke of luck it's her, and she wants to scream at them to shut up, shut up, _shut the fuck up,_ because if she needs _luck_ , that means the therapy isn't taking, and she is by God and Jesus going to walk again.

And she does. Walks out of the hospital nigh upon a year later on her own two feet (three toes lost to frostbite, the shoe insets still new and rubbing the stumps raw, and she'll never wear pretty red shoes or go dancing again, but she's walking), looks General O'Neill in the eye and on the level as she tells the General she's planning on opting for the handshake and the medical discharge to go along with her Purple Heart. And she goes on home with Momma and Daddy and they've done a little remodeling to the tune of a first-floor on-purpose bedroom with a half bath and Cammie doesn't say a word about it one way or another, just grits her teeth and clamps her fingers hard around her cane and drags her aching ass up to her own goddamned bedroom, the one that's got the same royal-blue with red-and-yellow spaceships wallpaper it's had since she was five years old. And she eases herself down on her bed and says things have to get better now, because at least she's home.

And six months later she's back in Colorado Springs, living in a rathole walkup over a Thai restaurant, and oh God, she doesn't know where to go or where she belongs or who she ought to be but this is the only other place on Earth that feels even remotely like home. At least she can keep up with her twice-weekly therapy appointments without either having someone drive her back and forth or getting into an argument every time she wants to use one of the cars, and the staff at the Academy Hospital is practically like family at this point.

For the first month and a half she was home Momma said 'time enough' and for the next month Momma said there was enough for Cammie to do right there on her own front doorstep and for the last two weeks Cammie was _packing._

And now that she's here in her own place -- four walls and her and silence -- she can pull out her soul and take a good long look at it to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life now that she can't do the only thing she really wants to do ever again. She spends three months trying to work up an interest in _anything_ , but inside she's cold and numb and she can barely manage to get out of bed in the morning, much less to call some want ad. The end of her terminal leave clocks right by and she doesn't even think of calling General O'Neill. What could she say? _Changed my mind, General? Don't know what else I could be doing? Fuck it, you got me, now figure out something to do with me?_

Yeah. Just another crap day in Paradise (and she knows she's _fucking drowning_ and she can't quite care) when there's a knock on the door.

#

When she gets herself over to the door and hauls it open -- Momma sends care packages like they might be Cammie's sole source of food, and the guys on the route are almost always nice enough to bring them up the stairs rather than leaving them below or making her go downtown to the USPOD to pick them up -- she stands blinking in surprise.

Teenage girl. Hair bleached blonde -- brows are dark, and Cammie's eyes flick in automatic assessment to the fractional line of dark along the center part -- with big chunky highlights in candy pink and bright turquoise. Her hair's pulled up into two pigtails, and that and the pink spaghetti-strap tank-top with the spray of rhinestones right over the tits might make her look like a schoolkid, but it's a little hard to tell her age under all the Urban Decay she's got layered on, eyes shadowed and ringed in black, lips outlined in dark red and filled in with glistening silver frost. Her fingernails are painted some dark color -- black or blue or green -- but they're manicured back to the quick, and what Cammie first took for a sheer long-sleeved t-shirt under the tank isn't. It's tattoos.

Finish the outfit off with short cutoff jeans, black fishnet stockings, and a pair of combat boots that never saw combat (unless she stole them from the First Battalion Transvestite Brigade, because they're patent leather, and oh, Cammie remembers Sam laughing at her for buying a pair a lot like that, a thousand years ago) and the look is balanced on the knife-edge between 'punk' and 'hooker.' "I think you're lost," Cammie says.

"Hah. You're Cameron Mitchell, right?"

The voice, the face, the _eyes_ , the single dry mocking bark of laughter, raise Cammie's hackles and make her head ring with a sudden rush of adrenaline. Because she can see the body (soft round skin and high firm breasts and those don't lie; you can't put ink like that -- _grisalle_ work -- over surgical scars and no plastic surgery ever born has been able to erase age from a woman's neck and jaw) and it's a girl's body, young and ripe and trembling at the edge of all grown up but not there yet. And her eyes and the twist of her glistening mouth are ancient and those two things don't belong together (but Cammie knows about so many things that shouldn't be, alien spaceships and alien warlords and Earth's Secret History) and for just an instant Cammie wants to slam the door in her face and pretend she never opened it.

But she's a cripple and she might be a failure and she's damned if she's going to add 'coward' to that tally. "Yeah," she says.

The girl nods sharply (and something clicks in Cammie's mind: there's a boy inside that girlsuit; that's how a boy moves, not a girl) and pushes past her into the living room, slinging the leather jacket in her hand over her shoulder as she passes. "Huh," she says this time, looking around, and Cammie feels irritation and faint shame ( _If I'd'a know'd I was having comp'ny today I wouldn't'a given the maid the day off._ ) because the place isn't _dirty_ (that would ping Momma's radar and get her up here faster than a call from an ER doc saying her only daughter was _on her deathbed_ ) but it's messy. "Seems like you and I could help each other out," the girl says.

"I've already got a cleaning service," Cammie snaps, and the girl spins around and pins her with a stare.

"You have no fucking notion who I am, do you, Mitchell?" she says and there's defiance and irritation and something that's almost despair in that tone, and Cammie's torn between the desire to _get the hell out of here_ or _come to attention._ And she won't do the one and she can't do the other, and there's something here that almost, almost…

She shakes her head slowly. _No, sir, no ma'am, I have no fucking clue at all who I just opened the door to, and why don't you tell me?_

"I'm Jack O'Neill," the girl says. She smiles again -- it's rueful, and bemused, and heartbreaking, and in that moment, even with all the hooker-paint, she's so breathtakingly beautiful she takes Cammie's breath clean away. "Or I used to be. A while ago."

Cammie can feel her mouth dropping open, just a little, while she's trying to process this. General O'Neill has a crazy daughter? Oh, wouldn't be the first time. "Honey," she says, as gently as she can, "If you don't want to go back home, might be I don't blame you, but I'm not plannin' to get in between you and your Daddy."

"'Daddy,'" the girl says, and her voice just goes flat for a moment, as if it's too much effort to put any emotion in it at all. Then she shrugs, and she's back in the game, and oh, it's too damned crazy, but Cammie recognizes a sister here. Fighter. _Survivor._ "I suppose. In a manner of speaking. Better get your ass back on the couch, Mitchell, I hear you got pretty banged up down in Antarctica." She tosses her jacket onto the recliner and walks into the kitchen.

Cammie stands there for a moment, blinking (is General O'Neill crazy enough to tell his daughter top secret information; she wouldn't have thought so five minutes ago), but her knees and hips and back hurt like liquid fire and she was too damned quick to the door to grab her cane (always pretending to herself she doesn't need it just to walk a few steps when the fact is that she does and always will) and if she stands here much longer she's going to fall down. She gets herself over to the couch and eases herself down, biting her lip hard to keep from groaning. In the kitchen, she can hear General O'Neill's Crazy Daughter going through the fridge (and she needs to have something else to call her, even though she really hopes she can find out what she wants and send her on her way as quick as possible.) "You got a name?" she calls, as soon as she's got her breath back and her voice is steady (knee feels like somebody's pounded a nail into the kneecap, and that's an improvement on how it felt six months ago.)

"I go by Jezebel these days. Jez. This _pad thai_ still good?" Jez calls back.

"It's from yesterday." Mrs. Chaisorn from the restaurant downstairs has taken it as her personal mission in life to keep Cammie from starving; it was an unpleasant revelation to discover that cooking was awkward on most days and impossible on some days because she could no longer stand comfortably for any length of time at the stove or the counter and doing the grocery shopping had become a royal pain in the ass.

She hears drawers opening and closing as Jez searches for cutlery, and a few moments later the girl comes walking out, beer and takeout carton in one hand, fork in the other, scooping food into her mouth as if it's been a while since her last regular meal. She crosses to the couch to hand Cammie one of the bottles (of her own damned beer, and she remembers when she could knock back a six-pack on a Friday night with a fingers-crossed promise to go running Saturday morning, and she can't do that now, and she has to watch _every fucking calorie_ ), then flops down in the recliner, sprawling wide-kneed.

 _Boy in a girlsuit,_ Cammie thinks again, but then Jez pins her with those dark eyes and Cammie thinks that whatever's wearing this girlsuit, it isn't a _boy._ The eyes are wrong -- dark and old and full of pain and laughter -- and all of a sudden her skin crawls in good earnest ( _oh Christ on a pony, Mitchell, how stupid can you be and live?_ ) because they'd all got the briefing, chapter and verse, and How To Tell If Your Buddy Has Been Infested By An Alien Parasite. Because flying against the _Goa'uld_ , being shot down by the _Goa'uld_ , there was always the chance it could happen.

"You've got a number you can call, I know. If somebody comes along trying to get you to roll on the Program. I kind of hope you won't," Jez says quietly.

"I just bet," Cammie says, scoffing. She's seen Jez move: quick and vivid and full of a teenager's careless vitality and a whole future lifetime of barely-repressed energy thrumming just under her skin. Cammie doesn't have a hope in hell of beating Jez to the door or in any kind of race, and her personal weapon is in the goddamned _bedroom._ Maybe she can manage to get there without raising suspicion if she can convince Jez she has to pee.

"If you have to call somebody, call Carter. Ask her about the time O'Neill was cloned. And tell her I said she's not that bright."

Cammie gives Jez a disbelieving look, because she did _not_ just fall off the turnip truck and knows this is how the bad guys fish for information, and suddenly there's that smile again -- joyous and radiant (and wrong and right at the same time) that invites her in on the best joke of all, if only Cammie could find out what it is. "Major Samantha Carter, who's been your friend since the Academy. Who served with Colonel O'Neill in a special ground unit for seven years. Which your squadron was assigned to protect in Antarctica. From, an, oh, 'meteor shower,' I think they said."

Cammie finds herself smiling back (despite deep suspicion and best intentions), because yeah, their cover stories really really suck. Sam told her for _years_ that she was working in 'deep space telemetry' under Cheyenne Mountain, and that sure as hell didn't explain the fresh burns and the fresh bruises and the new scars and the new reflexes that Sam always had (layer on layer on layer) each time Cammie saw her. And finally Sam tapped her to fly their new alien airplanes and so much had started to make sense. "You can keep talking," she says, taking a swig of her beer (though if she wants to move anything like quick and easy it should be a big handful of pills and a good shot of bourbon and it was coming up on time for what would get her through the afternoon and into the evening and the pain is settling into her bones like gravity.)

Jez sets the empty carton on the floor and salutes Cammie with her own beer. "A couple of months before you went down, I was born."

She doesn't have to do the math, but Cameron Mitchell couldn't avoid it anymore than she could keep from _breathing._ The battle over Antarctica was 26 months ago, and there is no way the whatever is sitting in the chair across from her is a toddler. "What the hell are you?" she asks. You never know. She might get an answer.

Jez drops her chin and stares at the floor for a moment; the gesture is oddly familiar, but Cammie can't quite place it. Then Jez looks up again. "A clone," she says. "I was cloned."

_'Call Carter. Ask her about the time O'Neill was cloned.'_

"Tell me," Cammie says.

"Imagine you're--" Jez stops. "No." She shakes her head. "Imagine you're a fifty-five year old man. _Try,_ Mitchell. And one morning, you wake up … and you're a fifteen-year-old girl."

"Oh my god," Cammie says. Half sympathy, half disbelief. But belief as well, because General O'Neill isn't someone you forget when you've met him, and he came to her bedside while she was still in the hospital and told her she held his marker, and she doesn't think he'd ever say that lightly. And she doesn't think any teenager ever born could manage to play-act General O'Neill. And this one is.

"So Carter said. Or words to that effect. Many, many words to that effect, all boiling down to: I might be a clone (and thank you very much for that, Carter) but I was supposed to be male. Well, I wasn't. I'm not. An Asgard named Loki cloned me -- cloned him -- cloned Jack O'Neill -- and really, really, _really_ screwed the pooch. And he never noticed, because, well, there haven't been boy Asgard and girl Asgard in a really long time and it just never occurred to the little grey bastard to check under the hood before he swapped the two of us so he could do a bunch of experiments." She smiles wickedly. "It really didn't work out well for him."

Cammie can't imagine (not really) having been born a man. She's always liked being a woman, for all that Sam's spent her life (when Cammie poured enough medicinal tequila into her, anyway) bitching about 'This _Man's_ Air Force' and saying that a woman had to be twice as good as a man to get to the same place. Cammie's always been twice as good. It hadn't been a problem. But she isn't _stupid._ She knows the power and privilege and ease that come in the military just for being male and tries to imagine spending fifty years moving through that kind of world and fitting yourself into that kind of life and then waking up one morning as a teenager of _the wrong sex._ And she can't, and she knows she's missing something here.

Jez sets down her empty bottle and smoothes both hands back over her hair. "At least I knew I was a copy almost immediately," she says, and there's something, some information, in her voice that Cammie can't decode. "I remembered being O'Neill, but I wasn't him. We knew we had to find him. We got him back, he got his life, I got … high school."

"I, um, I… did General O'Neill adopt you?" Cammie asks. She's floundering, she knows, but she _cannot imagine_ why _General O'Neill's clone_ (and oh, yes, she believes it now) would knock on her door to tell her the story of her all-too-brief existence just on a whim.

"I don't think so," Jez says dismissively, and Cammie can tell that subject is closed. "They set me up with fake paper and a foster family, but I hit the road before the ink was dry." She leans her head back against the recliner and stares at the ceiling. "I had to figure out how to enjoy being a girl, and I sure as hell couldn't do that in high school. So this-that-and-the other and I'm here to offer you a business proposition. You going to listen, kick me out, or call the NID?"

Cammie isn't quite sure what kind of business Jez has in mind, because from the look of her, the kind of business she's been in lately is the kind you do in motels that rent rooms by the hour (and oh, Momma would _smack her_ for thinking something like that about a guest, true or not). But it's also hella true that Cammie wouldn't call the Nids about this for cold cash money, she doesn't see any reason to kick Jez out right now (shot down in August two years ago so it's October now, meaning damned cold out there even with a leather jacket, and she wonders if Jez has a home to go to, and Sweet Jesus, she _can't even take care of herself_ , how can she try to take care of somebody else?)

Hearing her own thoughts shocks her cold (kind of like eavesdropping, except it's on yourself; you still hear as many things you don't want to hear as the other way, though) because all her life, Cammie's taken care of other people (Ash and her cousins and nieces and nephews; all the boys and girls in all her commands, whether _she_ was in command or not, but the last of her boys and girls, her Snakeskinners, are dead down there on the ice and she sure as Christmas didn't take care of _them_ ). "You talk an' I'll listen," she says. "No promises."

"Fair enough. Look. My bike's parked down on the street. Let me move it into the alley and get my stuff before I go into this."

"You should just bring it on up the stairwell," Cammie says. This isn't the worst neighborhood, but it's not the best either, and bicycles go missing.

Jez flashes her a don't-be-stupid look, bouncing to her feet. "Motorcycle, not bicycle," she says. "And if they run the plates, they won't even find that it's stolen. Gimme five. You need anything from downstairs?"

"I'm good," Cammie says. And she realizes with grateful surprise that she doesn't need to bite back even one bit of _don't you dare treat me like a fucking cripple_ out of her voice. Daddy lost his legs when she was ten, and Momma brought him home, and she and Momma nursed him when he needed nursing and Momma never, _ever_ catered to him -- she'd told him his military career might be over but his life wasn't, Everett Raymond, and they'd cut off his legs and not his head. And Daddy picked himself up and put himself back together and now he and Uncle Roy and Uncle Bayliss have a crafts business that's the talk of the State, and she'd expected the same thing when she went home, not hovering and too much care and everybody watching their P's and Q's around her like she lost her mind in that crash along with everything else. That's why she chucked it and ran.

But Jez … even though Jez has done nothing _but_ notice the way she's broken and banged from the moment she walked through the door, it doesn't matter. They're just _facts_ , like the fact that Jez used to be General Jack O'Neill and now she's a seventeen-year-old girl. Who apparently counts stealing motorcycles among her new hobbies.

Jez nods (sharp and quick) and takes off, leaving her jacket behind, and Cammie hears the quick clatter of her boots on the stairs and oh, she _will not think_ that once her own feet would have made the same sound and never again. She grabs her cane and drags herself to her feet and stumps off to the kitchen to count out her afternoon pills and toss them back. Washes them down with a swig of orange juice from the bottle in the fridge and washes _that_ down with a carefully-measured-out shot of whiskey. She's not ever going to the place where a bottle keeps her company on the couch all afternoon; she'll take her liquor in measured shots, in the kitchen, standing up.

She's halfway across the living room again, moving carefully, whiskey on top of beer mellowing things out and the pills should have their teeth into her in ten or fifteen minutes, when Jez gets back. She's got two bags slung over her shoulder: an enormous cabin-type bag and its little sister. Both of them are bright pink canvas. She drops the big one off her shoulder unceremoniously beside the recliner, sets the smaller one down a little more gently on the seat, unzips it and lifts out a hard-shelled laptop case then comes over and flings herself down on the couch next to Cammie. When she opens the case, Cammie can see that what's inside is state-of-the-art.

Jez smells of perfume -- something musky that's settled wrong with her chemistry, alternately too sweet and a little rank. The tiny straps of her tank-top have slipped down off both shoulders (Cammie can see the faint chafing to the skin where the strap of the duffels pressed) and she hasn't bothered to pull them up again. Even this close, Cammie can't quite make out the designs inked into her body: the images swirl like smoke, a collar starting at the base of her throat and covering every inch of skin Cammie can see until they stop a few inches above Jez's elbows: grey and lighter grey and still lighter grey and twisting hair-thin lines of true black and the design bleeds and swirls across her skin like clouds, but Cammie's sure there must be meaning there.

"I need a partner," Jez says, and Cammie stops (for heaven's sake) staring at her skin and looks her in the eye.

"For?" she asks.

"You know computers?" Jez asks, gesturing at the laptop spread open across her knees.

Cammie knows a little. The 302 was half bomb, half computer, and then they called it a 'near-space fighter-interceptor' and expected to find pilots for it. She'd been one of the first who stuck; computers had always been a hobby for her, never something she knew to the point of being a marketable skill, but she nods and shrugs and Jez launches into her explanation, and whatever else she's been doing since she dropped out of high school, she's clearly been boning up. The gossip at the Academy Hospital ran that General O'Neill couldn't program his own cellphone to save his life, so either Jez is one damned fast learner, or General O'Neill's reputation is a useful smokescreen. She's got software half-built already, flexible and extensible and tailored with a career military eye to the gaps in the military-industrial complex they always turn to contractors to fill: GPS satcomm software, intended for Naval carriers. Cammie's role in all this is to learn enough to get up to the level of junior programmer and then…

Once they're ready to go, she needs to be the one to take the meetings. "Me?" she says, feeling a little shocked.

Jez laughs out loud at her tone and the look that's probably on her face to go with it. "With your medals and your respectability and your fetching Southern smile, honey. My paper doesn't even have me legal for another year, and teenagers might be hackers, but they don't sell software to the Pentagon."

Teenage hackers don't, and _transsexual hookers_ sure as hell don't, and Cammie isn't quite sure who else is living under this pretty painted skin. Other than, of course, the backup copy of a fifty-five-year-old Air Force General. A fifty-five-year-old _male_ Air Force General. But the deal Jez lays out is a good one and more than fair: Sixty-forty split on income for the first five years in Jez's favor; patents and royalties to be shared equally. Travel costs to come out of the operating fund they'll set up with the money from the first contract. After five years, they'll renegotiate, and it's only when Jez is saying that and waiting for Cammie's agreement that Cammie realizes that Jez is expecting this deal to stick for five years and maybe more.

"There's a lot of other people you could'a picked to go partners with," she says slowly, because she's still trying to figure out the _catch._

Jez closes her laptop and leans back, stretching, hands linked over her head. "Sure. _So_ many people I could walk up to, Mitchell, and tell this little story to and have them believe me." Her voice isn't even bitter, just resigned, and Cammie isn't sure why she expects to hear bitterness, but … Jez (it's 'Jacqueline Jezebel Nielson' on her papers, Jez says) got the high hard shaft from the universe, and that pisses most people off to the point they finish the job the universe started. "So. In or out?"

And hell. It's not like she's got anything better to do, and at least this is _interesting._ "In," she says. "You can crash on the couch."

#

That part of their arrangement lasts exactly two weeks, until the day Cammie comes home from a bad day when a combination of physical therapy and a pressure system coming in over the Front Range and being on the rag have filled her bones with napalm and torched them, and PT means she's had to look at every angry scar and twisted gouge where muscle used to be and deal with her useless goddamned reproductive system on top of it, because since The Accident she's never been regular, so waking up to her so-called monthly was a charming surprise and the doctors have told her she can't risk a pregnancy anyway because she can't afford to put that much extra weight on her spine and she was getting to the age where she was going to have to decide pretty soon kids or no kids but it _really fucking bites_ to not get to make the decision herself, to feel the cramps on their own merry schedule and look at her fucked-over body and listen to the whisper in her mind that goes: _never, never, never._ And the _last_ person she wants to see when she drags her ass up the stairs and into the apartment is perky athletic goes-running-in-the-morning-and-does-Tai-Chi-in-the-afternoons-Jez.

Who _isn't_ seventeen and _isn't_ sorry for her and can still put enough whipcrack in her voice to make Cammie do just what she wants her to. And Cammie isn't a _little_ girl -- she's got a good few inches and a good few pounds on Jez, and could be she always will, because no way of telling just what Jez is going to grow up looking like -- but Jez is steady enough to walk her across the living room into the bathroom and stubborn enough to bully her into the tub and strong enough dead-lift her out of the tub afterward, Cammie holding onto her forearms like they were a set of PT bars, and then Jez walks her into the bedroom and lays her out on the bed, and while Cammie's drifting off on a one-pill-over-the-line pink haze, Jez puts her hands all over Cammie's back and strokes and presses and in the morning when Cammie wakes up, everything only hurts as bad as it usually does and the other pillow smells of Jez's perfume.

And that night, and every night after that, Jez matter-of-factly bundles herself off to Cammie's bed with Cammie. Two or three nights a week now Cammie's bed time ritual includes a massage, shoulders to thighs, and it doesn't let her back off on the pills any, but she doesn't have to kick it up a notch. She's sleeping better now for all kinds of reasons. More exercise. Fresh air. The body in the bed next to her.

It's not the first time Cammie's shared a bed with a woman, platonically and otherwise. She's never seen any reason to limit her options, always looking at men and women with an equal eye -- sex was for fun, and to make everybody involved happy, and if both those things happened, no harm no foul (and half the fun, sometimes, came from making Sam sputter when they'd be out somewhere and Cammie would point out a fine-looking woman and ask Sam if did she think she'd be interested in making up a threesome, because Sam is ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths straight, but more than that, she's _conservative._ At least without the intercession of tequila).

Cammie's gotten pretty much used to treating Jez like a roommate. There's not a whole lot of privacy in a tiny one bedroom (one bathroom) apartment, and she'd be a lot more gun-shy about the whole deal if Jez hadn't already seen her mother naked and not so much as blinked at the Antarctic roadmap. Cammie always gets the weird feeling that Jez _sees_ her but _just doesn't give a rat's ass_ , which is comforting in a really disturbing way. Like most of her life these days, while they fight about work and who used up the last of the orange juice and is Jez _ever_ going to stop leaving her makeup all over the bathroom sink? (The answer to that seems to be 'no', and since she gets up first in the morning, Cammie's never seen her without makeup, either.)

#

It's two months after Jez moved in, so it's December, and she's putting off the decision about going home for Christmas until The Very Last Minute (knowing that it isn't a choice, but she's going to fool herself as long as she can), and they're at a yarn store downtown because an hour ago Cammie threw a screaming fit and announced that the Christmas knitting wasn't ready, it would never be ready, she'd started it much too late, there wasn't going to _be_ Christmas this year, and _she's run out of yarn._ And Jez closed her laptop and announced she was going to go fix her makeup and then they were going to go buy more yarn, and Cammie had better be ready to go.

When she goes out with Jez, Jez always manages to stay one step behind on her off side, running crowd interference and letting Cammie set the pace without ever making Cammie feel like she's slowing them down. As soon as they're down the stairs and out in the open air she feels better; it's cold but not snowy, so the footing's good.

"Figure we could stop at that Lebanese place downtown that--" Jez stops. "There's a Lebanese place downtown you might like. Unless you want to knit us lunch."

By that point Cammie's nerves are settled enough that she just laughs.

Cammie's favorite emergency (meaning overpriced) yarn place in the Springs is crowded this close to the holiday, and everybody keeps slanting unsettled looks at Jez, who has an 'I could be trouble' smirk on her face. None of the ink is visible today, but she's wearing enough leather to upholster a _cow_ , and by now Cammie's been out in public with Jez enough to know that she _always_ pings the people around her as wrong.

 _"I've got two ways to deal with it,"_ Jez told her a little while in, after the first time they'd gone out in public together. _"I can try to pass as a normal teenage girl -- and not let people know why they're freaking out when they look at me -- or I can take the war to the enemy. If they think they see the reason they're worried, they won't look past it."_

 _"You could learn,"_ Cammie had said. Because there are a lot of years between Jez and the grave, and that's a long time to _not fit in._

She'd been rewarded with what she thinks of as one of Jez's 'angel smiles', honestly sweet and like no expression Cammie could ever imagine on General O'Neill's face. _"I can be a girl, or I can be seventeen, Mitchell. I can't be both. I'm figuring on being able to pass better when I'm older."_

At the yarn store, Cammie picks up several 'in case of' skeins, a few mill-ends that she's not sure what she'll do with but they're too interesting to pass up, and six balls of deep pink mohair that will knit up into a pretty top for Jez. Not in time for Christmas, and Cammie's soul _cringes_ at the thought that she can't give Jez something hand-knit for Christmas, but they haven't even quite settled whether they're exchanging presents. It won't exactly be a surprise, either, since Jez is right there with her, carrying her basket while Cammie heads slowly and carefully up and down the aisles, and is watching her buy the yarn. Jez considers knitting to be a practice somewhere on a level with voodoo, though, as far as Cammie can tell -- a bizarre survival from the mists of human antiquity, not susceptible to logical analysis.

They're on their way up to the cash register when an over-eager shopper, small child in tow, plows into Cammie as if she's invisible. It hurts (a lot) at least partly because she doesn't go down; she drops her cane and slams into Jez, who has apparently spontaneously chosen this moment to step in front of her.

"Thanks for the save," she says, although it hurts, it hurts like _hell_ , her right hip feels jarred out of its damned _socket_ and the only thing worse would have been a full-out fall.

Jez is looking past her and her eyes are cold. "Actions have consequences," she says, very softly, and Cammie isn't sure right now whether Jez means stupid people in yarn stores or crazy Asgard scientists, but what she does know is that Jez has never looked _actually scary_ before.

"Leave it," she says (and, oh, Command slumbers but never dies; she remembers talking just that soft and gentle to boys and girls the Air Force placed in her care in half-a-dozen hot spots when tempers ran high and Common Sense had left the building), and Jez's eyes flick back to her, and she smiles.

"The paperwork goes on forever," she says, and steps back, and bends down to pick up Cammie's cane and hand it to her.

#

The Lebanese place is only a few doors away from the yarn shop. It doesn't look like much at all from the outside -- Cammie's passed it the other times she's been down here without a single glance -- but Jez swears the food is good. They go in and work their way all the way to the back (less chance of being bumped there) and Jez lets Cammie have the seat at the back wall and hitches her chair around sideways so she won't be sitting with her back to the door.

A waiter brings them glasses of icewater. Cammie's a little surprised to find table service here, it's the kind of place with a deli case up front and about five tables in the back. The waiter is living proof that God loves them and wants them to be happy: he is simply, absolutely, _beautiful_ , and for the first time in longer than she can remember, Cammie feels the faint stirring of a voice inside that says that maybe just 'clean' isn't enough, but she can't bear to wage the battle for 'pretty'; there's nothing she hates more (has always hated) than fighting a battle that was lost from the start.

Jez says something to the man -- in Arabic, Cammie's pretty sure -- and he looks surprised as he answers in the same language, but there was no doubt in Jez's mind (Cammie could tell) that he knew the language. And he's nodding and smiling, lighting up like a Christmas tree, and Jez is leaning in just a little, talking animatedly (they could be discussing the weather or hockey stats or ordering lunch; Cammie has no clue) and suddenly there is one damned big 'click' in her mind.

Jez isn’t Jez. Jez is General O'Neill. She's never made any secret of it. It was, in fact, just about the first thing she announced, walking through Cammie's front door. And once upon a time there wasn't one red-blooded breathing man alive who could look at Cammie's tits without either having to mentally geld himself (can be done); feeling a pressing need to think of icebergs; or running though his inventory of pick-up lines. Jez hasn't been doing the lock-down thing -- she'd be able to tell -- and Jez hasn't been looking at her tits, either, and Cammie just figured (didn't want to think about it) that it was a combination of the fact that General O'Neill is an officer and a gentleman of the old school and what Cammie already knew: no man was ever going to look at her again and want what he saw.

No.

The _oh my God_ is unfolding in her mind like one of those toy paper flowers you drop into water to make them bloom, and it's relief (it's not me) and it's curiosity (is this Jez or General O'Neill?) and it's fierce triumph (at seeing the truth when it's right in front of her) because in the last two months, Jez has seen Cameron Mitchell ninety kinds of naked, and she hasn't looked at her with one-tenth of the interest she's giving their waiter.

 _He's_ giving their waiter.

Cammie wonders if Jez is as confused as she is.

The waiter smiles and bows and walks away, and Jez turns back to her, about to say something, probably to subtitle the conversation, and Cammie's mind is spinning around so fast with what she's just figured out that she doesn't (God damn and blast it all to hell and back again _sideways_ ) get her face tucked away in time, and when Jez locks eyes with her, Cammie can see that she's reading her like a goddamned fucking _book._

Jez jerks her head sideways, breaking eye contact, staring off at nothing, and Cammie can see the color rise in her cheeks. She can just about _taste_ how badly Jez just wants to run out of there and maybe keep on running, but Cammie had the next thing to a fall and no telling how well she'll be moving after lunch and she knows Jez knows it and that Jez won't leave her to wrestle two bags of yarn on the bus or in a taxi through the Christmas crowds when they came out together.

It's a long five minutes before she turns back. "I like boys," she says defiantly, and Cammie isn't fooled by the cocked-head 'fuck-you' smile. Jez wants to hurt somebody, sure, but if she knows who it is for certain, Cammie will deep-throat her own damned cane.

"Ain't nothin' wrong with that," she says carefully. "So do I. Like girls, too."

She has the answer (she thinks) to at least one of her questions (not even a question, because it's something she doesn't have the right to ask.) If Jezebel Nielson likes boys, well, that's fine and dandy: girls are supposed to like boys, that's birds and bees talk. But it's really damned clear that General O'Neill liked boys (men, anyway) before there ever _was_ a Jezebel Nielson, and fifty-forty-thirty years ago that's a lot less dandy, and it doesn't fly at all well if you've chosen the Air Force as your career. Not back then, pretty much not now, and all of a sudden her brain takes another two-step into overdrive and she thinks about the man running Homeworld Security. The _eminently blackmailable two-star General_ running Homeworld Security.

"No," Jez says, shaking her head. And her pigtails bounce, but she sounds sad and tired and every year of the age she isn't. "No," she says again, and she's not answering Cammie's last words, but her face. Her thoughts, which she doesn't seem to be able to keep to herself today, and isn't this a fine time and place for _that?_

"We made a choice," Jez says very quietly. "A long time ago." She presses her forefingers into the inner corners of her eyes for a moment; with a flash of insight Cammie knows that General O'Neill would press the heels of his hands against his eyes, but Jez wears makeup.

Up until this moment, Cammie thought she was seeing all there was to see. Jez had told her who she really was; Cammie had seen how insanely-difficult it was for Jez to pass for normal -- 'normal' being defined as 'what she looked like.' It's only now, hearing Jez say that 'we' made 'a' choice, that she starts to really _get_ how bizarre Jez's life is, and it's not even the restart sex-change part. It's the part where you share your _entire history_ \-- except for the last couple of years -- with another human being. There's a person out there that Jez knows more intimately than maybe two people ought to know each other. All the things you might not want somebody else to know; Jez knows. And Cammie realizes that Jez might not be that good at being a teenage girl, but she's really damned good at passing herself off as Not Weird, and Cammie's fallen for that act hook line and sinker.

She can't make up her mind whether she's angry or not. No right to it when they never promised each other that kind of truth, but it still feels like being lied to, and Cammie's never been good with that. And she can't decide if she has a right to her anger if Jez is keeping General O'Neill's secrets instead of her own, but … where do his stop and hers start? And is pretending to be less strange than she is keeping secrets or not?

"Food's here," Jez says neutrally as the waiter comes back. "Take your pills."

"Don't you fucking _mother_ me," Cammie snarls, and so much for deciding whether or not she's got a mad on.

Jez holds up her hand to the waiter, speaking in Arabic again, smiling sweet and apologetic and pretty, and it's an expression Cammie has _never_ seen on her face, because Jez meets the world spitting and snarling and laughing at it, fighting all the way, but Sweet and Merciful _Bleeding Lamb of God_ , in just that instant Cammie can see Momma in that face under the whore-paint, can see Aunt Lou-Ellen and Aunt Lavinia and even Gran'ma -- all the quiet deferential steel-spined Church Ladies who married their men and buried their men and held house through Hell and high water and in the New South that meant career, kids, living on post, officer's wife and officer's life and never let them see you flinch. And the waiter nods and takes the plates away again before he's even set them down.

"We're not going to have this fight here," Jez says, getting to her feet, and her face is as shut down as Cammie has _ever_ seen it. "Now take your meds, Mitchell, and get your ass in gear because we're leaving if I have to goddamned carry you."

Her voice is flat and deadly, promising Hellfire and stating facts, and there might be only one thing in the world Cammie agrees with her about right now, but it's the fact that a public place is no place for the conversation they're careening toward. She fumbles out the bottle that holds her midday pills from the zip pocket of her vest and swallows them with ill-grace. She insists on standing beside Jez at the cash register up front while they wait for their order to be converted into take-out, and the whole time she can feel the war in her back and hips and knees between unsettled pain and oncoming medication. It doesn't improve her temper any.

There's more chance of hitching a ride on Santa's sleigh than there is of snagging a roving taxi. Jez phones the company they usually use while they're waiting at the counter, but the dispatcher says there'll be a half-hour delay before a car can get to them. The bike quietly vanished a while back, and Cammie doesn't keep a car up here -- sold her pretty little T-bird to Jessie before she moved back North again, making Jessie swear on the life of her unmet future husband that she'd treat Miss Mam'selle Hepzibah better than her unborn children. And the apartment is only half a mile away, but it might as well be in Denver. They wait at the kiosk on the corner. The bus comes first.

The ride is passed in silence, but it isn't a companionable one, it's just utterly silent. Cammie would almost forget that Jez was there, actually, except for the fact that Cammie is moving within that invisible bubble of space that only exists when she's out with Jez, and right now she really needs it, because the first bus that came on their route isn't one of the kneeling ones, and she _hates the fact that it matters._ The nearest stop is a block from the apartment, and it's the usual Special Hell of people trying to crowd through her to get on while she's getting off, and the fact that Jez is (oh-so-casually) loitering between her and them doesn't make it better. She can still see their faces, and every expression from impatience to anger to the polite averting of the eyes flicks her on the raw.

Silence all the way to the apartment, and Jez has a set of keys to the place by now, but when they're out together, by tacit agreement, it's Cammie who unlocks the downstairs door and locks up the upstairs door. And (just as always) once Cammie's unlocked the downstairs door, Jez runs up the stairs ahead of her, carrying all the bags, digging in her jacket for her keys. And Cammie grits her teeth and grips her cane and drags herself up the stairs _step by fucking step._

When she gets up to the apartment and inside and locks the door, she sees Jez is standing beside the recliner, arms locked behind her, feet planted slightly apart, spine straight, head up and staring at nothing. It takes Cammie a moment to identify the position. Parade rest. _Miss the Air Force, General? Well so do I._ She keeps her tongue firmly between her teeth as she yanks off her jacket and hooks it over the coathooks beside Jez's leather jacket and shuffles her way over to the couch and plunks down probably harder than she ought. It jars everything and she grits her teeth. _Fuck you, Jez. Fuck General O'Neill. Fuck everybody._

Oh, God, she wants to go _home._ And she would, _if she just knew where it was._

"You think I haven't been honest with you," Jez finally says, still not breaking Parade Rest (and Cammie thinks of more than one Come to Jesus Meeting with a superior officer, where she'd stood just that way.) "Maybe not -- if you define honesty as full disclosure. I never promised you that, actually. And you didn't ask."

It's too damned much, because Cammie's let Jez into her home, into her _life_ , into the last place she had where she could pretend she was all right, pretend she was normal and capable and didn't need help at all, and Jez has helped her pretend and now it turns out that all that help came with a hidden price-tag and there'd been a whole list of questions she was supposed to think to ask and hasn't.

"You could have told me General O'Neill is a faggot," Cammie snaps, and inside she's cringing in horror. Of course she knows the words and has even used them -- in fun, in play, with friends for whom it's all right, for whom it's a shared joke. Not this way, the way they were originally meant, as viciousness and pain and poison and slinging mud at a man who's done nothing but put his life on the line for Earth since about the time she got her first command and _this is not her._

Jez turns her head to look at her then, and Cammie expects to see contempt -- deserves contempt, she knows, and would welcome it just now -- but Jez is still all locked up tight. There isn't even pain showing. "I do not have any right to give up any of his secrets. Ever." And Cammie isn't sure what it means that Jez calls General O'Neill 'him' as if he's someone else, because he is, but … he's not.

She finally moves, flinging herself down into the recliner with the loose-limbed sprawl that always reminds Cammie of one of her boy-cousins, because tits and ass and paint and pigtails aren't worth a cup of warm spit to the way Jez flops and gangles when she's comfortable and relaxed (the way she'd gotten around Cammie these past few weeks) or when she's _dropping the fucking moonlight and magnolias._ This time she _does_ press the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressing and rubbing, and when she takes them away her makeup is smeared in wings across her cheekbones. Cammie wonders how long it took her to learn to paint her face, to learn not to touch it. But she scrubs her hands down her thighs now, absently, the way a boy who'd got his hands messy would. She's wearing thigh-high purple cotton stockings with an ornamental garterbelt (green); the garters are meant to show beneath the short leather skirt, and they do. She's got on a powder blue Powerpuff Girls t-shirt that was too small to begin with, and then she trimmed it up with scissors, cutting out the neck and shortening the hem and taking out the sleeves at the seam. The result fits like kiddieporn spraypaint, and the contrast between her clothes and the way she moves is jarring. Still. Always.

"None of this is his fault," Jez says, and it might be something she's telling Cammie, but it's also got the sound of something she's spent a long time telling herself. "I spent most of a year hating him so much I couldn't breathe. He had my life. Because he'd been born -- man born of woman, born to trouble as the sparks fly upward -- I existed. 'Oh, Daddy, I didn't ask to be born.' Sing me another one. I got over it. Poor bastard. Saddled with the freak, the geek, and the girl, and when the Asgard clone him, he has tits. He never does catch a break."

"Not like you," Cammie says, and she laughs, low and ugly, desperately wanting to grab control of her mouth but she just can't manage it. "Hell, honey, you can drive stick for the rest of your life and ain't nobody going to say a word." And she hates herself, and she doesn't know where these words, _this language_ is coming from. Not her. Not her generation. Not her _life._

But if she wanted to get Jez's attention, she's finally managed it. "You stupid bitch," she says, and the tone is mild and conversational, and it flays Cammie to the bone. "Or should that be: Major Mitchell, ma'am? Or is it 'sir?' If I hadn't screwed up today you would never have known. It is none of your business. It is none of _anybody's_ business but his. You think I haven't… I dropped off the radar and I fucked my way from Denver to New York before I was twelve months old and how long do you think it will take O'Neill's enemies to put two and two together if I surface publicly with a boy-toy on my arm?"

Cammie ought to be following along with Jez's logic, but this isn't a day for that. She's a couple of sentences behind. "Don't you _ever_ call me a disgrace to the uniform," she says, low and furious. "Don't you so much as _think_ it. You have no right."

"At least I could read and follow the Code of Conduct," Jez snaps back, and oh, she's mad now, mad as Cammie's ever seen her, mad enough that it isn't 'he' now, it's 'I', because deep down where Jez keeps her secrets, she's still General O'Neill, and she doesn't take that out and look at it any more often than Cammie takes out the memory of the last time she went running free and whole and able under a blue Nevada sky.

"And just which one of 'em were you keepin' your hands off'n of?" she shoots back. "Couldn't'a been Sam." Goddamned temper, and Momma spent years with a wooden spoon teaching her to fight clean and this is anything but that: this is the poison that's been building up in her from the moment she stumbled over Jez's carefully-hidden secret, and Cammie doesn't know why. It's only after the words are out of her mouth that she realizes they have to be true. General O'Neill was in love with somebody, had to be, and it was a point of pride that he never made a single move in that direction.

And right on the heels of that revelation (it seems to be a day for them and in command and in combat they'll save your ass but right now she could _do without them_ ) comes the raw painful self-knowledge of just _why_ knowing the truth about General O'Neill, about Jez, hurts so much. Jez is beautiful, and affectionate, and she's been _here_ 24/7 and she looks at Cammie as if she isn't a wreck and a freak and she touches her as if she isn't disgusting and when she sees her naked her eyes don't slide away and she's slept beside her for the last six weeks, and Cammie knew not to dream, not to wish, not to _hope_ , but she'd still…

She wants to take the words back, take the _day_ back, because Jez is just looking at her, and her expression is pain and the same survivor-shock that never really goes away when your life's been shot to ruins around you but you're left standing. She swipes the back of her hand across her mouth -- leaving a broad red glistening smear across her cheek -- and rubs her eyes again, smearing the last of her eye-makeup over her forehead and across her nose. She's forgotten it's there. "It _was_ Carter," Jez says (half protest, half answer). "It was all of them." She curls down, elbow propped on her knee, dropping her face into her hand to hide her eyes and gestures vaguely with the other one. "All of them. It doesn't matter now." She raises her head. The thin smear of dark over most of her face makes the bones stand out in sharp relief, and she ought to look clownish, but she doesn't. "And it's still none of your goddamned business."

Oh, god, Cammie just wants to crawl away and _die._ Right now. "Think you made it my business the moment you came knockin' on my door." She'd like it to come out more gently than it does, but at least if it's half-nasty, it's honest and clean.

Jez grimaces -- half wince, half acknowledgement -- and gets to her feet. "Yeah. All right." She gets to her feet, looking around, and for the first time she seems to see the makeup all over her hands. Without another word she walks past Cammie into the bedroom.

When Cammie hears the bathroom door shut, she gets herself to her feet again and works herself into the kitchen. She gets down the bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Takes them back into the living room and sets them out on the coffee table, making room among the piles of books she blew a grand on two months ago to turn herself from somebody who could unfreeze the CO's computer into somebody who could write code and get her teeth into a life where she'd never be beholden to anybody ever again. And Jez hasn't headed straight out the door, but she might just be fixing her face before she does.

Jez is gone for almost fifteen minutes, and when she comes back she's wearing a pair of her running shorts and one of Cammie's sweatshirts and she's barefoot, and seeing that is like a gut-punch of sheer relief -- _oh thank god she isn't going to run off just now_ \-- that's so strong it takes her a few seconds to realize there isn't one speck of makeup on Jez's face. She's taken her hair down, too, and brushed it out, and it frames her face, just below chin-length. Without the mask of makeup she looks younger. Like one of Cammie's sweet girl-cousins (Mrs. Chaisorn from the restaurant downstairs thinks Jez is Cammie's sister, and Cammie's never been able to see it before, but there really is enough of a resemblance there for them to pass as kin) and closer to fourteen than seventeen until she looks toward Cammie and suddenly everything's wrong about her face. The look in the eyes and the expression on the lips don't match up with a face that still hasn't quite shed the last of its puppy-fat, and Cammie's mind keeps wanting to tell her that Jez is disfigured, has had plastic surgery (like some of the guys she saw at the Academy Hospital) but it's not that. It's old wine in new bottles, and it's something that shouldn't be.

"How come you're a girl?" Cammie asks. It's the first thing that pops into her mind. At least it's better than wondering about General O'Neill's sex life or love life or anything about his life before _he_ was _she_ , but she's never asked before, because until now, the past has been off-limits.

Jez rakes her fingers through her hair and sighs. In shapeless clothing she actually looks more girlish, more female. "No clue. We asked. Thor said -- our -- DNA was copy-protected, but he couldn't explain it either." She walks over and sits down on the couch beside Cammie, reaching for the bottle. " _Jurassic Park_ was mentioned," she adds, and it ought to be one of her sassy-ass remarks, but she just sounds tired.

She pours both glasses half-full. Mid-afternoon, and at least four ounces of whiskey there, and it's lunchtime and no lunch. Cammie picks up one and Jez picks up the other. She stares down into it for a moment then drinks half of it in one gulp, shuddering.

There's a few minutes of silence, while Jez stares down into the second half of her drink and Cammie sips hers and knows they aren't quite done fighting yet and thinks she ought to be apologizing right now only it's a little hard to figure out just how that should go when the person you took the cheapest of cheap-shots at isn't here -- not exactly -- and it might be more polite to pretend that he isn't and never heard what you said than to own your words.

And all of a sudden Jez tosses her head back in the way she does when something's just struck her funny. "'Faggot,'" she says, and Cammie flinches. "I bet they called you a dyke?" She slants her eyes sideways at her, but Cammie can't read the expression, not really.

"Yeah," Cammie answers, low. "Sometimes."

A smile now, but it's General O'Neill's, not Jez's; just a twist of the lips. Cammie's pretty sure she'd never be having this conversation with General O'Neill though. "Called Carter that, too. So I heard. And I'm pretty sure Carter's straight."

Cammie can't imagine how either Jezebel Nielson or General O'Neill would have heard any of _that_ particular name-calling (the same names men fling at _any_ woman who makes it in a man's world, no matter who she likes to fuck), but she nods. "As a ruler. Look, I--"

She's on her way to her apology, because some things have to be taken back, even if you just take them back to the _walls_ , but Jez interrupts her. "I really did need a partner to front for me. And it had to be somebody with your kind of clearance. But your mother called Carter and Carter called me."

There's about five seconds while Jez's words rattle around in Cammie's head and then all fall into place. She knows Sam and Momma keep in touch; have since Cammie took Sam home for that first Christmas. And Cammie knows Momma wasn't happy with her decision to come back North, even though Cammie papered it over at the time with 'moving back to finish up my therapy with my regular doctors' so they could all save a little face. And Jez has never flat said that she cut ties with the SGC and never looked back -- not in so many words -- but it's been implied in everything she _has_ said (little as that's been) about where she's been and what she's done, and that Sam knew to call her -- that Sam _could_ call her -- does not fit into that picture _at all._

"You get the hell out of my house and don't you ever come back," she says, and a moment ago she was terrified Jez would go running off, and now she never wants to see her face again.

"Sorry," Jez says unapologetically. "You owe me. To the tune of one promise, and you might as well listen to an explanation while you're at it."

"Go to hell," Cammie snarls. Jez just laughs. The sound is so merry -- not a shred of either pain or anger in it -- that it makes Cammie check her anger and just _stare._

"Been there, done that, got the t-shirt," Jez says, and the look she's giving Cammie now isn't exactly pity. It's the look of someone who's been everywhere that Cammie is now and doesn't need either explanation or justification. And Cammie _will not_ wallow in the special self-pity of thinking she's the only person Life ever dealt a shit hand to, so she sits back and just _glares._ She'll listen, and _then_ she'll throw Jezebel Nielson out on her ass.

"I ditched high school, stuffed my head up my ass, and spent about six months in teenaged rebellion. The SGC would have been able to trace me if I'd hit any of the accounts they set up for me, but I didn't. Guys will pay good money to… Well, back then I could pass for twelve. You get the idea."

Cammie tries not to wince, but something must show on her face, because Jez shakes her head, disagreeing.

"Ancient history. I knew what I was setting myself up for. And it's not like I _am_ … anyway. I needed something a little more long-term, and I needed to decide what it was going to be, and I needed to decide who _I_ was. Two out of three isn't bad. Carter emailed me about a year back. I'd released a package on Sourceforge. She asked if I was who she thought she was. I didn't lie to her. I knew they -- the SGC -- had probably been looking for me since I vanished. I was going to have to surface sooner or later; Carter could put the word around quietly that they could stop looking quite so hard. We've had a few threads going back and forth now and then since then: she doesn't know where I am physically, but she has an email address that I check. I mentioned I was going to be looking for a front man. It wasn't going to be this soon. But she told me about you, and she asked me to come see you."

"She couldn't come herself?" Cammie says. Sam visited her in the hospital when she could, but there've only been a couple of phone calls since Cammie moved back North and she's let the answering machine take them.

"Bit of a hike. She's been transferred to Area 51. But the bottom line here, sweetheart, in case the drugs and alcohol have scrambled your pretty pink brains, is that you're getting on a plane home for Christmas, and you're going to let your family tell you that they love you, and before anything else, you're going to give me your word that anything you think you know about O'Neill stays in this room."

"My word as an officer and a gentleman?" Cammie asks defiantly. And she's not even sure what she's fighting about now, because she could skip Christmas home as easily as she could _fly without a plane_ , and Jez doesn't know her at all if she thinks she's the kind of person to go telling tales out of school, and it's not so much being angry as pounding on a half-healed bruise because the pain of that helps you ignore the pain of everything else.

A spark of anger glints in Jez's eyes, and Cammie sees the ripple of young-old- _wrong_ expression pass over her face. "If that's what you'll honor," she says evenly.

Cammie thinks of the way Jez's voice sounded when she said 'family', and thinks of how Sam said that SG-1 was the best family she'd ever had, and thinks of how much Jez lost and turned her back on and left to General O'Neill and is protecting for him. She grips the glass in her hand and lifts it to her lips, knocking back all that's left in it as if it were well-water. Nobody can change how God made them, and you can't help who you love and how. But she won't disgrace the uniform she'll never wear for real and true again any more than General O'Neill has ever disgraced his.

"You have my word," she says evenly.

Jez nods. "I'll get my things, then," she says.

She sets down her glass and gets to her feet and picks up her laptop and unplugs it and walks into the bedroom and it takes Cammie a moment to realize that if Jez is taking her laptop into the bedroom then Jez is packing, Jez is _leaving_ and she isn't even sure what she thinks about that (because, dammit, Jez is more right than not about the scramble-factor of her pills and a good knock of whiskey on an empty stomach, at least until they've all settled out) but the one thing she _does_ know is that this project, this business (the chance to take care of someone, a little voice inside says, and she tells it to hush up), has given her a good reason to drag her ass out of bed in the morning and she knows for sure and certain that Jez is telling the truth about needing somebody to be the public face of the company and it has to be somebody who knows what's living under her skin. And when you come right down to it, Cammie's throwing Jez out of her house two weeks before Christmas for nothing more than thinking a pretty man was pretty, and oh, _Lord_ , Momma would smack her six ways to Sunday for that and it's nothing to what Cammie would do to herself.

She grabs her cane and hauls herself to her feet. The living room spins just a little and right now the pain is pushed down to where the temptation is to imagine the next step is that it's going to go away completely and her therapist has warned her (over and over and over) that if what she does at this point is _push_ , what she's going to have is two or three days or even a week (or maybe more) of paying back for every minute of that reckless hope. She takes it slow and steady into the bedroom (back straight, hips straight, anything she twists and stresses and doesn't catch in time she'll pay for later) and stops in the doorway. Jez has both her duffels open on the bed and is making a last check around for her things. They'd been on their way to her getting drawers in Cammie's dresser, but they hadn't been there yet. Cammie's sweatshirt is neatly folded on the pillow; she's stripped to the waist and all of her ink is visible. She'd said once it was moving the scars from the inside to the outside (and Cammie isn't the only one with scars, and she's never thought she was, and it's something she always tries to remember, because _they really suck_ but they aren't a free pass.)

She stops and looks up when she sees Cammie in the doorway (and a woman half-naked, even one easy in her skin, will hold herself different than a man stripped to the waist; there's so many tiny things that Jez can't quite know -- or if she does know them, no way to know if she's got them right or not with nobody to help her.) "You don't have to go," Cammie says. "I just… I guess I've got a temper sometimes, and I… you don't owe me anything."

"Jet jockey," Jez says, and (maybe) there's something of fondness there. "You're right: I don't owe you a damned thing. Earth owes you more than it's ever going to pay, though."

Cammie makes a rude noise. "Owes you, too, I guess."

Jez shrugs -- neither a 'yes' or a 'no' -- and pulls out a wifebeater from the big duffle and skins it on. She stands there for almost a minute, and Cammie gets the feeling she's getting an even more thorough inspection than she got when Jez showed up. "We're a hell of a way from 'code complete,'" Jez finally says. "When you get back after Christmas, I'm going to work you like a racehorse."

"Yeah, you try an' keep up," Cammie says, and Jez just tosses her a smirk and hauls out her ginormous makeup bag and walks into the bathroom with it.

The rest of the day isn't the easiest one they've spent together, but it isn't the worst. Jez dishes up the take-out (Cammie's got more of an appetite than she thinks she'll have) and then buries herself in her laptop. At bedtime, Jez comes in just as if it were any other night, laying her out and stroking and prodding all the knotted muscles into submission. Cammie tries to protest, and receives a: "For crying out loud, Mitchell, you had a helluva knock today, now shut up and let me work," in reply.

But Jez doesn't stay afterward, and that's enough to keep Cammie from sleeping. She can see the light in the living room, and hears the tap-tap-tap of the keyboard, and that isn't enough reason why.

She's not in that much pain, but it's still one of the bad nights, the white nights, the ones where her mind won't shut down and let her be. The afternoon's conversations churn over through her mind: _which one of 'em were you keepin' your hands off'n of_ and _we made a choice a long time ago_ and _you can drive stick for the rest of your life_ and _it was Carter -- it was all of them_ and _I bet they called you a dyke_ and _your mother called Carter and Carter called me_ and she realizes that the temper-tantrum she threw helped Jez tap-dance her right past the question she never had the right to ask in the first place: _which one of 'em were you keepin' your hands off'n of?_ Not only because it's none of her business, but because he _did._

 _'Figure we could stop at that Lebanese place downtown that--'_ Jez had started to say earlier that day. _'The freak, the geek, and the girl,'_ she said a little later. And Cammie can put names to all of SG-1 by now. General O'Neill's team, only it was Colonel O'Neill then, and the 'freak' was an alien named Teal'c, the 'geek' was a civilian named Dr. Daniel Jackson, and the 'girl' was her friend Sam (who'd mentioned 'Daniel' casually over the years, but only on the phone or in person, and never with a last name, and at one Christmas Cammie had asked Sam if she was serious about this guy and Sam had looked at her and laughed and then she'd been crying on Cammie's shoulder and when the tears had passed she'd said it was nothing like that at all and Sam's never been able to lie to Cammie worth toffee and she'd believed her). Cammie knows Sam's opinion of any cuisine that doesn't involve either Velveeta or Miracle Whip on the ingredients list (deep suspicion until properly introduced), so the restaurant isn't likely to have been one of her favorite places (which is how that sentence was going to end, Cammie's sure of it, with a name and an endorsement), and she's not quite sold, somehow, on the idea that it could have been Teal'c's and that leaves Dr. Daniel Jackson and Sam is a shit judge of the male character (exhibit fucking A: Jonas Hanson) but Sam has had damned few friends, male or female, in her life and Cammie suspects that Daniel Jackson is one of them and it's not an easy thing to be Sam's friend sometimes and Daniel Jackson managed it for eight years of front-line combat and that's as much as Cammie needs to know about him and it's got to be him.

And oh, she doesn't know whether Daniel Jackson might have been interested back, or is as ruler-straight as Sam is, but you can't be a Mitchell without knowing your politics (because you can't stay the hell out of something if you can't see it coming a long way off) and politics and the military have gone hand-in-uneasy-glove ever since General Washington became President Washington. She _knows_ Washington (DC) has always been uneasy about the Program -- lightning-rod for their allies and ticking time-bomb combined -- and SG-1 was at the eye of that storm. The politicians would have used the faintest whiff of _anything_ to roll them all up (and God help them all when the bad boys came calling) and the Snakeskinners didn't get so much attention, but then, _they_ weren't sitting right on top of the Stargate. She isn't sure who her heart breaks for more: General O'Neill (and she doesn't pity him, because Mitchells understand sacrifice, but sometimes it's a damned hard road to walk) or Jez (because if Dr. Jackson _is_ straight she's the right sex now and it don't make a damned bit of difference if she's holding General O'Neill's secrets to keep from pulling him down).

She lies there all night awake and Jez sits up all night coding and eventually it's morning.

#


End file.
